Wednesday, 27 August 2008

What's God's will for my life? It's that I should believe in Jesus Christ and pursue holiness, obeying his commandments.

Lots of Christians are continually asking "What's God's will for my life?". But what they mean is, what job should I do, where should I go on holiday, how should I use my time this evening. This is all good, in it's own way. We should submit all major decisions to God, and seek to please him in everything. But, do we sometimes miss the wood for the trees? Though we seek God's providential guidance as we go to this place or that place, ultimately as we look at the Bible as a whole we must say "where you go on holiday is essentially a matter of indifference". God's will is that you speak kindly to your wife, trust in every situation in his Son, do works of kindness towards those in need, pay your bills and taxes on time, witness about Jesus to those who are lost, and so on. You know - the "ordinary", "dull" things. Actually, if we may so speak, from God's point of view, your holiday is dull - but practical holiness is something he finds really interesting. How do I know this? Because the Bible he gave us says lots, more and then plenty more still about holiness!

It ought to grieve a right-thinking Christian to see so many continually looking for a special "word from the Lord" to do with things that are matters of indifference from a Biblical point of view... whilst giving scant attention or effort to those things which the Bible speaks about on every page.

What we're never likely to be shown is the evidence that it's actually the children who aren't having the government's brand of sex education who are the ones spreading the various STDs that "solutions" like this are meant to solve.

The "big picture" trend here is this one: every societal problem has the same solution: more government control over more and more areas of life that every sane person used to know was none of their business. Because government solutions in our day are normally humanistic ones devised in ignorance of the realities about man and his creation, the result is predictable: more societal problems, leading to more such solutions, leading to... and so on.

Saturday, 9 August 2008

The instructions for an MP3 player I've just bought are full of this kind of thing, the famous Chinglish:

Give or get an electric shock the quantity ample, show whole full. Along with the increment that use time, the electricity measure designation and will let up.

A few lines later:

The sweet hint: Broadcast time in a specific way, take solid machine as to allow!

Sweet indeed! Now, obviously whoever translated this should be sent back for more classes. The real problem though, is surely that this is actually what he learnt in classes. He's presumably never really spoken with an actual English person, and done all of his instruction in a little "bubble" of other Chinglish speakers.

If you're a Christian, are you one of those Christians who spends all his time in a little bubble with other Christians, such that you can't actually communicate meaningfully with an unbeliever? Or if you're a preacher, are you one of those preachers who is so engrossed in the bubble of study, conferences, Greek lexicons, and so on, that your preaching is basically Chinglish to anyone not in the same bubble? Does everybody who goes away from your sermons, regardless of how much understanding they had of Christian things before, go away knowing exactly what you said, why you said it and what they're meant to go and do about it? Or do they come away thinking "I wonder what that meant" and just go bumbling on as if there had never been any instruction book given to us at all?

On Monday, the "Edinburgh Creation Group" is hosting a talk (this is during the Edinburgh fringe week, I think) with blurb as follows:

"In 2006, the British atheist, Richard Dawkins, published his book, The God Delusion. Since then it has caused a big stir worldwide, causing many to question the existence of God. He once said, 'It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)'. A local scientist, Dr Marc Surtees, looks at the evidence."

Dr. Surtees, according to the same web page, "has a first degree in Applied Biology and a PhD in Zoology", so he's qualified in the same field as Dawkins was before Dawkins left behind professional science in order to dedicate himself to promoting amateur philosophy ...

Anyway, I just heard on the grapevine that Dawkins himself is in Edinburgh (there is a debate between Professor John Lennox and Christopher Hitchens in Edinburgh today, so I suppose Dawkins is there for that), and that he walked past someone handing out fliers for this debate, who also had fliers for the above "God Delusion" talk - with Dawkins' face on them!

I wonder if he'll turn up! I doubt it. The "God Delusion" book itself seems to be a studied attempt to be ignorant of what theists would actually argue. Follow the label link for more of that...

Friday, 8 August 2008

There's nothing new in this article if you read my blog. But, it's a bit longer and detailed, and unlike the stuff I tap in here it actually got edited and the tuping errors and spolling mistokes taken out...